Today has been electrically charged, first my interview with Andrew Bolt and Steve Price on their radio show in Melbourne, then rush to the airport, trying to do a radio interview on a cellphone while checking in, make a quick post on the skeptic blacklist, off to Hobart, then discovering your luggage never made the plane.
All was not lost though (well it might be if I don’t get my luggage). The first stop my trusty guide Alan made was to the Hobart Weather Station next to the Anglesea Army Barracks at Battery Point. He said, “you have to see this”.
Looks pretty nice doesn’t it? It is very picturesque looking out over the bay and the Wrest Hotel/Casino (the tall building).
This station was showcased by the ABC radio network om 30 May 2008, here and ABC supplied this photo with the story:
Notice anything interesting? I did, but nary a mention from the ABC. They write:
“The Battery Point site being the official site is where temperatures are verified against” said Malcolm.
Malcolm went on to explain that one of the limitations with the Battery Point site is that due to its location it will be affected by the sea breeze thus the temperature may not climb as high as places further inland such as Glenorchy or Brighton.
The major change in the operation of the site over the years is that where once a person would be on hand to measure the temperature, these days everything is done electronically.
In regards to the future of the site Malcolm said it is important from the Bureaus perspective that conditions remain as constant as possible as any major changes to buildings or even trees surrounding the site can influence the temperature readings.
Whilst such changes may only alter the readings by a tenth of one degree it is just such evidence that the Bureau need to establish long term trends in climate change.
They didn’t mention the most important feature – air conditioners. Lots of them. Here’s more of my photos:
Here’s a reverse angle, a composite of two photographs to take in the wide angle:
Here, David Archibald poses next to the Stevenson Screen and the A/C heat exchanger units:
The industrial sized unit in the foreground was working so hard it had iced up its coils. David scraped about an inch of frost off of it.
Here’s the aerial view.
Note that just measuring the distance to asphalt and the nearest building, the station is less than 10 meters away, making it a CRN4 station, which would be considered unacceptable by NOAA standards. It would fail by either the old 100 foot (30 meter) rule, or the new Climate Reference Network siting rule.I don’t know how much of the building built up around it or when, but it clearly fails.
Here’s the temperature data, via NASA GISTEMP:
The jump around 1970 may be of interest related to siting, but without more time to research that metadata I can’t speculate if it is related or not. Note the plunge though the last two years. Quite a drop.
And here is what the data looks like after GISS finishes with their “homogenization” adjustment:
While I don’t have time right now to do a full analysis as I’m due for a metting shortly, I can say it appears that GISS flattened out the could snap in the 1940-1960 period, making the long term slope more positive. I’ll look at that later.
The point here is, it seems no matter where I go in the world, I seem to find siting issues with official weather stations used for climate monitoring. Stations that are long period records of historical importance suffer the most from such siting issues, because their record is valuable. Worse, when the data is adjusted, it seems to add to the warming.
As Alex said at 4:42; In Australia, a ‘reverse cycle airconditioner’ heats in winter and cools in summer. I would be very very surprised if the units pictured were not reverse cycle. Therefore the effect on the outside air would be to cool in winter and heat in summer. The ‘ambient’ temperature would be anything but ambient for a large part of the year.
Units that heat as well as cool are popular in warm climates because it saves the cost of a separate heating system. They’re not powerful enough to warm a building in really cold weather. Even here in Florida, my cool/heat unit has a heating coil built in to supply additional heat in weather too cold for the heat pump alone.
I’m not familiar with Australia, but Tasmania may be far enough south that an A/C is not useful for heating in the winter.
The jump in temperature in the 70’s corresponds with the construction of the surrounding multistory buildings to form a partial quadrangle surrounding the temperature sensor during that period. The construction of the buildings is documented in the history of the Hobart meteorological service.
‘Two nations separated by a common language.’ (Sir Winston Churchill)
Yes, the units in the picture are what we call reverse cycle air conditioners in Australia. So yes, they are heat exchangers (literally) and they blow very cold air outwards in winter warming indoors. In summer, they do the reverse – hence the term: reverse cycle air conditioner.
Why are the raw and homogenized graphs on different vertical scales? It would be easier to compare if they were the same.
Those aren’t air conditioners. You don’t see frost on the outside heat exchanger of an air conditioner. Those are heat pumps and they’re pumping heat into the building, not out of it, in the picture.
It raises a legitimate question of whether the effect of pumping warmth out of the building in the summer is nullified by the opposite in the winter. Heat pumps don’t work worth a crap for heating when the outside air temperature is much below 50F because the outside heat exchanger ices up which stops the fan driven air from flowing through it. No such problem in the summer so, depending on how cold it gets there and for how long, there still might be more extra heat near the Stevenson screen in the summer than extra cold in the winter.
Another question that comes to mind – air conditioners became very popular around 1970 but heat pumps didn’t become popular for another 20 years. So those heat pumps probably weren’t there 20 years ago and they really were air conditioners up until 10-15 years or so ago.
P.S. to my previous comment re; heat pumps
The principle advantage of a heat pump is they only use about half the electricity for the same amount of heating vs. resistive heating elements. Principle disadvantages are capital outlay (they are way more expensive than simple heating coils) and rather limited in range of outside ambient temperature (45F-70F) in which they’re effective. Icing becomes a problem at the lower end of the range and you don’t need a heater at the upper end.
In general, a good rule of thumb for heat pumps working in either direction is that they need about 1 watt of electricity for every 2 watts of heat being moved. A heating coil needs 1 watt of electricity for every 1 watt of heating. It’s part of my standard lecture for the wife and kids in regard to keeping our electric bill down in the summer – if they have 100 watts of light bulbs lit up the air conditioner takes an additional 50 watts to compensate for it. In the winter, since we have an air conditioner not a heat pump, I encourage them to leave all the lights blazing as it helps warm the house and the extra light is just icing on the cake.
The aerial shot of this nicely protected enclosed area, bordered on one side by blacktop is all that needs to be said.
Ed Doda says:
June 23, 2010 at 3:40 am
Anthony it looks like what is needed are many perfect locations for temperatures to be reliably taken and recorded. What could be more perfect than the thousands of golf courses all over the place.
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Brilliant, sir!
Correction to my post above:
The regression was on mean temperatures of months DEC-FEB.
To evaluate p-values for the t-values calculated by Scott use d.o.f=98.
Notice that the errrors are not corrected for autocorrelation. This will widen the error intervals.
From Not A Carbon Cow:
Anthony it looks like what is needed are many perfect locations…
This comment triggered a thought – are there other locations in the area that we can compare these numbers against?
Daniel:
Here is a list of nearby stations:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/findstation.py?lat=-42.88&lon=147.33&datatype=gistemp&data_set=2
I mis-attributed the “perfect locations” comment. It was actually from Ed Doda.
As a rewording of my previous question, is there a way to find other, nearby locations that have high quality data that we can compare these numbers against?
The cans in front of the CRS in the 3rd photo look like high-wattage
floodlights for the flagpole. How much of this hits the CRS, and do
they stay on all night or just during the evening? Lows usually occur
around 5AM.
The buildings both shade the CRS and block air circulation, so it
would be useful to know when they were built.
Phillip Bratby says:
June 23, 2010 at 2:19 am
The data only go to about 1993. What happened after then?
Perhaps they went automated and started automatically discarding the data? 😉
@ur momisugly Gail Combs says:
June 23, 2010 at 4:16 am
Chris1958 says:
June 23, 2010 at 12:07 am
On the other hand, seeing’s it’s midwinter in Tassie, the air conditioners will all be blowing very cold air right now (but lots of hot air in summer).
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You are confusing a heat exchanger with an A/C unit. A/C cools only. A heat exchanger, like I have on my house cools in the summer and warms in the winter. It would screw up the records all year round except for the spring and fall – maybe.
It is hard to tell from a picture whether it is an A/C unit or a heat exchanger.
Since Anthony is American I am using the American definitions. Are the definitions different in Canada, England, NZ and Oz?
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The american terms would be A/C, for cooling only, and heat pump, for cooling and heating…
40 degrees from the equator is kind of extreme for a heat pump. They’re typically not used that far north or south, unless they’re geothermal units…
Here in Christchurch (NZ) where the latitude is similar to Tasmania, we call these units heat pumps. If they are similar units then they are predominately used for heating our homes during the winter and modern ones can work quite efficiently down to -10ºC. The outside fan will blow significantly colder air than the ambient air temperature. To stop the coils freezing the pumps regularly cycle through a de-icing phase where the coils are briefly heated and de-iced. Maybe the one David Archibald saw covered in ice wasn’t doing this cycle efficiently however he should have notice very cold air being blown out of the unit. This brings me to my earlier point – if they affect temp. recordings then they would influence the graph trend downwards during winter.
Scott says:
June 23, 2010 at 7:22 am
Søren Rosdahl Jensen says:
June 23, 2010 at 1:46 am
…
Additionally, this argument holds very little weight because you’re treating it like an isolated case. However, perform this same treatment to 1000 stations and suddenly the change is enormous with great significance. Additionally, if the city and nearby electrical consumption have grown in the last 100 years, shouldn’t the adjustment LOWER or even REVERSE the trend instead of adding to it?
-Scott
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Only if you believe UHI is real. Most climate scientists have evidently not driven through a city in a car with an outside air temperature indicator.
Try Dallas, TX, in summer: As much as 10 or more degrees difference between downtown and the edge of the sprawl. I’ve seen this effect passing through on many different ocassions.
@James Baldwin Allison
I guess 40 degrees north or south is not too extreme to use a heat pump, but only in a country that doesn’t have an ample supply of natural gas, which is generally cheaper for heating at most if not all latitudes where it is available. Of course, if you want to heat greenhouse-gas-free, install a few Westinghouse AP-1000’s there in NZ and by all means run those heat pumps to your heart’s content!
Living at 31 North and 100 kim from an ocean, the high efficiency heat pump I have is definitely not as comfortable in winter as the gas furnace was at my previous residence.
Aussies call them a reverse cycle air conditioners whereas the US calls them heat pumps – they are the same unit.
wolfwalker, you asked how far to not feel an effect?
My grandmother lived in a valley with open water at one end. there were days we felt the COLD breeze from off that water, even though it was hot outside. She was way more than 100M from the water.
those building are enclosures on three sides, with HVAC’s venting year round. 8m isn’t nearly enough distance to not be affected.
I like this one from Granada Hills, CA – Over a chimney. Must do wonders to raise the winter temps when they’re roasting chestnuts.
http://co2insanity.com/2010/06/12/california-trees-moving/
It is interesting to note that Alan was able to get Anthony ‘s presentation posted on the ABC website to advertise the event. This was verified by two seperate email’s from ABC with links that were checked confirming the posting. Shortly afterwards however a further email from ABC to Alan was received advising the notice had been removed with no explanation. This from the ABC that bang on about freedom of speach and the like! It seems that the Australian media are so arrogant and brainwashed that they will do what ever they can to stifle any sensible debate what so ever on ‘Climate Change’. Makes you wonder if Kevin Dudd had anything to do with it!? Any half reasonable person who after attending Anthony’s presentation would have to be sceptical about the claims that carbon emissions are the major cause of climate change.
Hot off the wires
Kevin Rudd may be facing a leadership challenge (for the Aussie Prime Minister job)from his Deputy. According to TV NZ news anyway.
Anthony,
The correct name for these A/C heat rejection units is ‘Condensing Unit’.
The frost that you probably saw built up on the suction pipe just means that the unit is low on refrigerant and requires a service call. This does not indicate that the CU was heavily loaded.
The larger water type heat rejection unit that you see on commercial or industrial roofs is called an evaporative ‘Cooling Tower’.
I would fully agree that ANY A/C heat rejection unit contributes to local area warming of instrumentation and the perception that ‘Its getting hotter!’